


The Ghost of Stern Theater

by JacarandaBanyan



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Ballerina!Steve, Blood, Captain America Reverse Big Bang 2019, Dancer AU, M/M, Non-Graphic Violence, Small But Strong!Steve, Steve blows past about a dozen warning signs to help Bucky, Theater AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2020-05-16 19:15:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19324393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JacarandaBanyan/pseuds/JacarandaBanyan
Summary: When his old theater burns down, Steve Rogers moves to the Stern Theater to continue his career as a dancer. Once at the theater, however, he quickly discovers that things aren't quite what they seem, and is quick to develop a sort of benevolent haunted/hauntee relationship with the local ghost, who may or may not have committed dozens of murders over the past couple of decades.A gothic, phantom of the opera inspired mystery where Steve is more interested in getting to know the ghost than in solving the mystery.





	The Ghost of Stern Theater

**Author's Note:**

  * For [calendulae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/calendulae/gifts).



> For the Captain America Reverse Big Bang. 
> 
> My partner for this fic was the lovely Calendulae! And the lovely moodboard was done by Kocuria!
> 
> Thank you to my roommate for betaing this!

The theater loomed over the street like a menacing gargoyle. In the rain it was difficult to see the details of the intricately carved reliefs high above him, but what he could make out looked like snarling demons. Pillars held up the part of the building that jutted out towards the street, casting the more removed, elevated main entrance in shadow.

He almost slipped several times as he climbed the stone stairs with his luggage to the front door, which was sheltered under the extended roof. The rain had begun to soak through his shoes, freezing his toes and throwing off the perfect balance he’d cultivated during his career as a dancer. His teenage self would have come down with something nasty just by looking out on the evening’s weather.

Steve didn’t want to be here. He wanted to be at his old theater, where he’d known all of his coworkers and the neighborhood hadn’t been a bunch of twisting, gloomy streets he could barely see through the downpour. But his old theater had gone up in flames, and the owners had elected not to rebuild, and he didn’t make enough money to turn down room, board, and a job at another venue.

He tightened his jaw to keep from gnashing his teeth in frustration.

This wasn’t going to get any easier, so he might as well get on with it.

He reached out and knocked solidly on the door with enough strength to feel the vibrations travel up his arm and cause the ornate door to shudder. For a few tense minutes, nothing happened. What was he supposed to do if no one answered? Could he just let himself in, seeing as he lived here now? What if the doors were locked?

When the door finally creaked open, he lost about half a foot in height he didn’t have slumping in relief.

An elegant black gentleman greeted him on the other side of the threshold.

“You must be Steve! Come in, come in. Sorry to keep you waiting. They really made you travel in this kind of weather?”

Steve shook his hand firmly and stepped across the threshold.

“Well you know, I was hired on pretty short notice, and I can’t really afford to miss practice.”

The man huffed in amusement.

“Yeah, I get that. On paper it looks like you’re putting in hours and hours, like there’s all the time in the world, but it’s never quite as much as you need, is it? Here, let me help you with that.”

He reached around Steve’s shivering frame to grab his suitcase and pull it in inside. Steve winced a little when he noticed that a dark spot was forming under it. Hopefully it wasn’t wet enough to form an actual puddle on the carpet. Sam didn’t seem concerned; he just wiped his hands off once on his pants, then closed the door.

“That’s more like it. This place’s temperature is always wonky enough as it is, no need to let the storm blow in through the front door like it has an invitation and make it worse. We’d probably still be feeling the wind blowing down random corridors a week from now. I’m Sam, by the way. I play clarinet and saxophone in the ensemble. Occasionally I get talked into playing the trombone.”

The sounds of the rain pummeling against the roof, walls, and street instantly dulled. If felt like Steve had stepped out of his previous life and into a mysterious new one. Which was silly. He was just switching theaters. In all likelihood, he’d be doing the exact same thing here as he did at his previous theater.

“Nice to meet you, Sam.”

“Here, let’s get you to your room. There’s a bunch of empty ones off the downstairs left corridor by the old practice rooms. They’re a little cold sometimes, but if you can’t deal with it you can always move later.”

Sam helped him lug his luggage down two flights of stairs, then lead him down the first corridor that branched off the main hallway to the left. He only got a brief glimpse, but he was still startled by the number of doors and other corridors branching off the hall. The theater was a big building, sure, but they’d descended two floors from the ground floor. They had to be underground by now. The above-ground part of the building had been plenty big enough for the needs of a theater, even a large, successful one with many live-in employees like him. Perhaps there was a dance school taking up one of the other floors, or perhaps they rented out rooms for music lessons.

He didn’t dwell on the thought. If he didn’t pay attention, he was going to forget the route to his own rooms.

“Most of the showers and bathrooms are upstairs, but I’m pretty sure there’s still at least one down here,” Sam said. “The owners did some remodeling a while ago, but I’m pretty sure there were still at least a few people living down here at the time. Besides, they didn’t redo any of the residence spaces, so they must have anticipated someone living here again. We can go try and find it once you’ve had a change to set your stuff down.”

Steve nodded and switched his suitcase to his other hand so he could shake out the other one. He’d gotten a lot stronger since his early teen years as a nearly-insubstantial waif of a child, and he could easily lift his dance partners now if the dance required it, but he’d been lugging this suitcase around all day, and it was starting to feel heavier than it really was.

“The first half of the corridor is mostly practice rooms that no one really uses anymore,” Sam continued. “Once you pass the painting of Tchaikovsky, though, it’s all bedrooms and possibly, if we can find it, a bathroom.”

Steve looked up at the row of not-quite-evenly spaced paintings of famous composers. It was a good thing, he decided, that they were in the basement where the bare minimum number of people had to see them. The painted features of each portrait were exaggerated such that they looked nearly demonic. Their improbable skull structure added a layer of fantasy to their twisted noses, lips, deep-sunk eyes and strange chins. They clashed wildly in tone and style, though perhaps that was Steve’s arts-focused education talking. Still, an arts institution like the theater probably saw the same issues he did and had them down here for a reason.

“I’m not sure I could tell you which one is Tchaikovsky,” he said.

Sam laughed.

“Yeah, I don’t know whose idea it was to buy these things. They’re ghastly, man. Look for the names on the bottom edge of the frame, they should be written there.”

A light chill pressed against Steve’s skin like a thin silk sheet in an unheated room. Sam had mentioned that the heating in the building was a little off, but it was noticeably colder down here than upstairs.

Up ahead Sam stopped outside one of the doors on the left-hand side. Thin, tarnished metal numbers above the door marked it as room number 127.

“This one should be empty. Well, they all look pretty empty to me, but this one was marked empty on the official room assignments list, and the owners told me to give you one of those, so. Here we are.”

Sam handed Steve a small key with a short loop of string threaded through it. It would probably fit rather loosely on his wrist, but not loosely enough to fall off.

“Go on in and set your stuff down, then let’s see if we can find the bathroom. Everything else you’ll have to go upstairs for, but there should be one of those down here.”

Steve stepped into the room. It wasn’t very big, and most of the space was dominated by a bed with an old, slightly-dusty looking comforter that looked like it had just been pulled out of a storage closet somewhere, but it was mostly clean. There was a bedside table with a lamp shaped like a seashell, and a larger light fixture hanging from the ceiling by the dresser.

He set his bags down next to the bed and returned to the hall.

“All set?”

“Sure. Let’s go.”

* * *

It turned out there were multiple bathrooms, but they were not easy to find.

There wasn’t one in Steve’s corridor at all. They opened every door, even the ones that were clearly just practice rooms, but not a single one lead to a bathroom. Same with the next corridor down the hall from his, or the next. They did find a sign on one of the walls with a woman in a pink dress and a man in a blue suit separated by a line and an arrow pointing down the fifth corridor on the left, but all the rooms in that corridor were locked. There was another such sign at the end of the main hall, but it lead to a dead end.

“I can probably just use the one we passed on the ground floor,” Steve offered at one point.

“I mean, you could, but that’s one of the bathrooms patrons use. You never know when you’re going to run across something dubious. And there’s always a line for the ones on the second floor, since more people live up there.”

It took nearly half an hour to find the tiny, single-stall room the size of a closet tucked away at the bottom of a half-flight of stairs behind a strangely-shaped door in an alcove just before the end of the corridor one the other side of the main hall from Steve’s. By the time they found it, they had walked down six other corridors, located a bunch of other unoccupied bedrooms that Sam swore weren’t on the official list he’d picked Steve’s room from, a practice room that looked like a hurricane had come through about fifty years ago, and a lot of mice. They’d only spotted the alcove with the oddly-wide and not-quite-tall-enough door after accidentally turning the wrong way and ending up back by the stairs leading to the ground floor by accident.

“Man, I haven’t been down here in a while, not since before they did the last round of renovations, but damn,” Sam said with a shake of his head. “This is insane. I promise the rest of the buildings not like this. People would get lost on the way to morning practice every day if it was.”

“Well, at least we found the bathroom,” Steve offered philosophically.

“I guess.”

On the way back, however, just as the finished ascending the half-flight and squeezing back through the strange door, Sam tripped over a skittering mouse. He yelped, tangled up his feet trying to dance away from it, and fell against the wall across from the alcove. He rolled to the side, trying to catch his balance a bit, only to find that there was no wall there. Instead, he tumbled into a large, twenty-stall women’s room.

“What the hell man, when did this get here?”

Steve offered him a hand up.

“We must have just walked by it.” He said lightly, but inside he replayed the memory of walking down the corridor. They’d checked every door, he was sure of it. It wasn’t like they’d walked through the hall looking at their feet.   

“Jesus, how did we not find this? I could have sworn we opened every door between here and your room. We were one step away from patting the walls for secret passages.” Sam pulled himself up by Steve’s arm, then processed what he’d just done. “Huh, you’re stronger than you look.”

Steve shrugged. Yeah, he was pretty small, but he was a far cry from the weak, sickly kid he used to be. His muscles weren’t big or flashy, but they were strong enough to lift several people with ease. That party trick never got old.

They quickly found a similarly-sized men’s room a few feet to the right of the women’s entrance. It was surprisingly clean, except for a small rot stain on the far wall. There wasn’t near as much dust as there had been in Steve’s room, or any of the other bedrooms they’d found.

“You know what’s weird about this?” Sam asked.

“The part where we apparently walked right by an enormous bathroom that’s more than three times the size of my bedroom?” Steve grumbled.

“That too, but doesn’t this look like a public bathroom to you? Like, for patrons, not like people-who-live-here bathrooms. Look, there’s even a sign over the sink about contacting the front desk if you lose something. I guarantee that’s not aimed at us. And there’s no shower.”

Sam was right, it _did_ look like a public bathroom.

“Why’s it down here then?”

Sam just shook his head. “The downstairs is weird, man. Maybe they used to have classes down here or something? Who knows.”

Steve’s eyes fell on a small puddle of water under the center-left sink. It was clear and undisturbed. His eyes trailed up the wall to the sink itself. Sure enough, there were little beads of water forming perfectly straight drip trails along the clean white sides of the sink, and a drip of water hung from the faucet opening. Someone had been in here just a few minutes ago. But he and Sam hadn’t seen anyone in the hallway.

A breeze blew in from the corridor and chilled Steve’s skin. He shivered, but didn’t point it out to Sam, who was already on his way out.

The third bathroom they found about a minute later, this time in Steve’s own corridor. This one had a shower, a thick shelf running under the mirror where you could set toothpaste and brushes, and a huge stack of toilet paper in a glass cabinet in the back.

“Okay, now I _know_ this isn’t right,” Sam said. “It’s like the rooms are moving or something.”

“Well, if they are moving, then it’s pointless to go looking for them, and if we just missed them somehow, then now we know where they are,” Steve shrugged. Yeah, it was weird, but he was tired. He’d traveled all day to get here, a strange, uninviting building where he didn’t know anyone and it felt like an ice age had descended upon the hallways. Sam was wonderful, but at this point he just wanted to unpack his clothes and get into bed.

Sam looked like he understood.

“All right then, I’ll give you some time to get settled in. I’ll see you tomorrow for breakfast? There’s a nice little cafe down the street where they make eggs to order and offer more waffle toppings than just butter and syrup.”

Steve hadn’t even thought about food, but now that Sam had brought it up he suddenly longed for familiar food. He was pretty sure he still had a sandwich in his backpack from the shop across the street from his old theater, but once that was gone he was going to have to make himself familiar with new food joints quickly.

“Thanks, I think I’d like that. I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

“See you.”

And then he was alone.

His sandwich had gotten squished in his suitcase, but that didn’t affect the taste, and after a long day of traveling followed by the bathroom misadventure, that was all Steve cared about. His fingers quickly turned sticky where the contents of the sandwich leaked through the crushed bread, so he was obliged to hold the whole mess delicately, with his fingertips, to avoid getting it all over his palms.

Once he was finished, he stumbled out into the hall to wash up before collapsing into bed. Thankfully, the rooms hadn’t mysteriously rearranged themselves again, and the bathroom down the corridor was in full view. Really, how had they missed it before?

In the bathroom, he ran the water in the sink for a bit, waiting for it to warm up, but if anything it actually started to feel colder against his testing fingertips. He briefly glanced at the shower before deciding against it. He hoped they just hadn’t turned the hot water on yet. He could get away with not showering tonight, but his chosen occupation was a very physical one. He’d need a way to get clean eventually.

He washed his hands in the freezing water, then gave his face a few splashes. Sleepiness weighed down his limbs, stretching a simple task like brushing his teeth into an interminable ordeal. So when he looked up and saw in the mirror a man standing in the hall behind him, he didn’t really process it. He blinked some of the cold water out of his eyes, where it had started to blur his vision a bit, and just like that the man was gone.

It wasn’t until the morning, after he’d slept soundly for a solid eight hours, that what he’d seen sunk in.

Someone else had been down there with him last night. They had stood outside the bathroom, watching Steve, then disappeared as soon as he noticed them.

Hadn’t Sam said he was the only one living down here?

* * *

The next morning, he met Sam at the entrance to the theater for breakfast. His head thrummed in that vaguely painful way that it sometimes did after sleeping long and hard, but it was already clearing up, and he was looking forward to a leisurely breakfast and a chance to talk further with his new friend.

He hadn’t seen any strangers in the bathroom mirror that morning, and he was prepared to write the incident off. Perhaps the man worked at the theater too, and wanted to say hi but left when he realized Steve was getting ready for bed. Maybe he was a janitor of some sort, and had come back later to clean once Steve wasn’t using the bathroom. Whoever he was, it wasn’t like standing near a bathroom was a crime.

“Good morning!” He called out to Sam, who was sitting in the shade of a short tree planted in a break in the sidewalk just to the side of the steps down from the main doors.

“Good morning,” Sam replied. “You’re a lot more chipper than you were last night. Do I finally have another morning person on my side?”

“Mornings are the best part of the day. There’s still time to run and eat breakfast and ease into the day, and you haven’t been locked into some list of things to do yet.”

“Finally, someone here agrees with me.”

Sam heaved himself to his feet and lead Steve down the street to a cute little cafe with sunflowers painted on the stere-facing facade. The entrance was cramped, but once properly inside Steve found himself looking around a bright, bustling space. The windows let in enough morning sunlight that the polished wood tables glowed a little bit, but not so much that it blinded anyone seated near the glass. A short woman wearing earrings that dangled far enough to glitter every time she moved greeted Sam with a smile and gestured at a booth off to the left, under a painting of a cat dozing in a kitchen.

If he had been planning to bring up the mysterious stranger last night, those plans completely dissipated.

“Did you run into any other problems last night?” Sam asked as he glanced at the menu. “That bathroom nonsense was wild. I’m tempted to go back down there and map the place or something, ‘cause at least half of the places we ended up last night aren’t on the floor plan where everyone’s rooms are marked.”

“Nope, still there.”

“Huh. Let me know if it goes missing again. The downstairs can get weird. Natasha says she found a room full of used batteries once.”

Steve blinked. “I’ll be on the lookout for that.”

Sam was clearly familiar with the menu, and after only a few seconds more of letting his eyes linger on the drink selection he slid it back into the little wire holder behind the salt and pepper shakers.

“You know what you want?”

Steve shrugged. Lots of stuff on the menu looked delicious, and probably would be delicious once he had it in front of him. But seeing Sam’s familiarity with the menu triggered a sudden, unexpected homesickness that made the undersides of his eyes burn uncomfortably, like he was sick and his eyes had been too watery for too long.

“What do you recommend?” He asked.

“The scrambled eggs on toast is pretty good. They serve it hot, though, real hot, so be careful when they first bring it out.”

Steve squinted dubiously at the picture on the menu.

“Is it as small as it looks?”

Sam’s eyebrows rose.

“No offense or anything, but I’m pretty sure some of the bigger items have a greater volume of food than your head.”

“Looks can be deceiving.” Quite deceiving, in his case. Sure, he couldn’t flex his arms and rip his shirt, but what use were building muscles anyway if you could get just as much strength out of compact, rock-hard yet unobtrusive ones?

Sam shrugged, but sent another interested glance at Steve’s toothpick-thin midsection.

“If you’re sure, then try the pancakes with bacon, eggs and toast. It’s a lot, but it’s good, and if you think you can handle it and not get sick when you start practicing this afternoon, then go for it.”

* * *

Sam was right; the food was good. Not as good, however, as Sam’s face as Steve tore his way through first one plate, then a second one.

* * *

He went to his first dance practice that afternoon. Technically practice for the upcoming show- his first show at this strange new home of his- didn’t start until tomorrow, when the choreographer returned from Moscow. Today was meant for extra practice of certain steps and movements, basic conditioning and the distribution of the practice schedule for the rest of the week.

Eyes rested on him like little stone weights, until he was sure their weight would pull his shoulders out of position or limit his leaps. They weren’t necessarily hostile stares, though one or two of them probably were.The woman he was paired with for the Pas de Deux section completely dismissed him. A redhead named Natasha looked him over dispassionately, like he was some sort of puzzle, or perhaps just a single piece of one. 

After the first ten minutes of stretches, she got up and walked over to stand next to him. Some of the eyes briefly slid from him to glance at her, and he was grateful for the reduced weight of the stares.

“Welcome to the Stern Theater, Steve.” The music playing from the old cassette player was just loud enough and her voice just soft enough that he realized the other dancers probably couldn’t clearly hear what she was saying. He wondered if he should take note of that. “Have you settled in yet?”

“Yes. Sam showed me around a little last night and helped me bring my stuff to my room.”

“Hmm. That’s good to hear. I didn’t see any new faces this morning in the hall or at breakfast, so I worried the owners might have actually made you sleep in a motel until the fist day of real rehearsals.”

“It must be difficult to keep track of all the new people coming in,” he said. “With a theater this size, I’m sure you get lots of through-traffic.”

She shook her head slightly. “We don’t often get new members in the _permanent_ performers roster.”

“Is that why you came over to talk to me?”

“Yes. We will be working together indefinitely, after all.” Her shrug altered the lines of her neck, and for an instant it looked like the neck of an angry swan preparing to lunge. “It’s best, I find, to establish friendships quickly. We all have to live here together, after all.”

* * *

Steve trudged down the hall once practice was done. His muscles ached and burned, enhancing the chill of the drafty corridor. If he didn’t know better, he’d think there was a cold wind whispering past him.

He shivered.

The hallway wasn’t quite dark enough to be called poorly lit, but it was definitely dim. The electric lights weren’t strong enough to push away the darkness entirely, so it lurked in corners, along the baseboard and along the walls. Shadows stretched behind whatever cast them like long, trailing cloaks whose ends couldn’t always be distinguished from the general gloom. It seemed to get dimmer and dimmer as he made his way deeper and deeper into the building, as though the darkness was growing stronger and harder to penetrate.

Suddenly, a soft sound came from one of the rooms lining the hall.

Steve stopped short. Were there other dancers with rooms back here? He wasn’t the only one who lived in this hallway, but he had thought he was the only one who lived this far down it. He peered through the gloom, looking for the source of the sound.

There! A little ways in front of him, the door to what he’d thought was an unused practice room was slightly ajar, allowing a little light to escape into the hallway. Slowly, he stalked towards the door, eyes glued to that sliver of light. Closer up, his weak ears were better able to pick out the sound.

Someone was singing.

It was a haunting sound, like a thrush warbling in the darker parts of the forest, where the light fell unevenly and moss cushioned the footsteps of wolves. The lowness of it vibrated through the air like an enormous church bell that hadn’t been rung in years. It was a man’s voice, but not any of the men Steve had met at practice. He would have remembered if any of those men had had a voice like this. Standing there listening to the cold, rough notes filtering softly from behind the door, he felt almost hypnotized.

It was a practice room. It must get more use than he’d thought the first time he’d passed it by. He shook his head and smiled ruefully at himself. He’d actually thought it was abandoned, like a whole building full of performers would just abandon a practice space. Sure, Sam had said no one really used the rooms in this hallway anymore when the new wing had fancier rooms with better acoustics, but those rooms probably went fast when there was a performance coming up. Whoever was in there was probably using it to avoid having to wait for one of the newer ones.

Though, it was rather late at night. He’d spent longer than he’d thought chatting with Sam, and most of his coworkers had to be in their rooms by now. He thought back to the poster he’d seen that morning at the front entrance to the theater announcing the next three months worth of performances and events. As far as he could remember, there wasn’t anything coming up in the next week or two besides an orchestra performance and a jazz concert played by a traveling band. Neither of those should have had a singer rushing to get in some last minute practice time.

He walked closer to the room. The sliver of light on the other side, combined with the lovely voice, was terribly tempting.

He shouldn’t interrupt them, whoever they were. Whatever performance they were practicing for, they must be very focused on it. If someone came up and tapped him on the shoulder while he was practicing his choreography by himself, he’d be annoyed. Whoever it was, he was sure to meet them later, when he wasn’t on his way to bed and the mysterious singer wasn’t practicing.

Suddenly, a draft blew down the hall. It hit his bare shoulders like an arctic wind, sending him into a flurry of shivers. As he shook, the door to the practice room creaked like an old oak in the wind and swung slowly open. Steve reached out to grab the door, but he was too slow. It hit the wall with an ominous _thunk,_ making him jump.

“Sorry! The door was open a bit, and the draft…” His apology trailed of as he stared into the room.

It was completely empty. The light was on, but the piano was pushed up against the back wall, and the music stands were folded down and grouped together in the corner. Not a single piece of sheet music lay anywhere in sight.

Steve blinked, then slowly walked forward into the room. No one was inside. It looked like someone had practiced hours ago, tidied up the space, and then simply forgot to turn the light off when they left.

But he was sure someone had been singing.

No matter how much he looked around the small room, no singer materialized, so he reluctantly switched off the light and backed out into the hallway. He shut the door carefully behind him, then continued on to his room.

The voice haunted his dreams all night long.

* * *

“Hey,” Steve greeted Natasha in the dressing room before morning rehearsal, “Do you know what the acoustics in the lower practice rooms are like?”

What he really wanted to ask was ‘do disembodied voices sometimes come from empty practice rooms,’ or perhaps ’is there a ghost haunting my corridor?’ But while his questions and worries had chased each other around his head all night long, in the light of day he couldn’t seem to put words to what he wanted to know without sounding silly. Were it not for the way that eerie voice made the hair on the back of his neck stand up, he might not have asked at all.

Natasha glanced at him, then back to her choreo sheet.

“Why do you ask? I didn’t know you played music. Are you holding out on me, Steve?”

“No, I never learned how to play any instruments or how to sing. I was just curious. There’s quite a few in my hallway, and I was wondering how soundproof they are.”

She nodded slowly, still looking down at her sheet. Her blood-red curls bounced a little with the movement, but the rest of her body was as motionless as if she’d suddenly turned to porcelain.

“I see.”

The air shifted, and suddenly Steve wasn’t chatting with a new friend before practice anymore. Natasha’s perfect stillness made him suddenly, irrationally want to go still himself. He felt like a mouse suddenly in the presence of a snake. A sleeping one, perhaps, that had eaten it’s fill recently and wasn’t looking to make another kill, but the sense that a terrifying strike could come at any moment from any direction settled on him like a chill.

Then Natasha turned to look at him, and while the movement of her head and the way her hair swung about her head as she moved should have broken the spell of stillness, it did not. A second later she was once again as still as if she’d never moved at all.

“Did you hear any strange sounds from the practice rooms, Steve?” She asked lightly. “A man singing from an unused room, perhaps?”

“How did you know that?” He asked.

She considered him for a moment. It was like being considered by a doll. Her face didn’t move the way it should when one was thinking deeply about something, and her eyes were empty as she weighed her words on invisible scales, calculating just how much to tell him.

“There is an urban legend of sorts,” she said at last. “About a ghost who haunts the less well-trafficked areas of the theater. There are a couple of different versions floating around out there. Contradictory versions, of course, but some elements are common across each version. That it’s a man, that he can sing and dance and play in the orchestra, but is never seen. That the further into the underground parts of the theater you go, the more likely you are to encounter him. That he sometimes murders patrons.”

A shiver went down his back. Her words were so wooden, like she was describing an esoteric character in Russian folklore rather than someone he had definitely encountered the night before.

“Has anyone told you about him before, Steve?” She asked.

“No,” he said. “The only person who’s really talked to me since I got here is Sam.”

The skin around the bridge of her nose wrinkled, but she didn’t offer up any more information.

“He’s a ghost story, Steve. If you think you ran into him, then I’m sure you ran into _something_. I just can’t seem to think of what.”

“If it wasn’t a man singing, then I’d be very curious to see what creature or object managed to imitate one so perfectly,” Steve said dryly.

“So would I,” Natasha replied. Her eyes stared unseeing at him for a long moment. Her pupils jiggled as they tracked images that only existed in her mind. But whatever it was she was trying to recall, it didn’t seem to want to come back to her. The light wrinkle just above the bridge of her nose deepened.

“Tell me if you hear this man again,” she said at last. “Or anything else like this.”

“Of course.”

He supposes Natasha would qualify as an expert in lovely, dangerous things, and the voice that haunted him was certainly beautiful. If she thought he should be on the lookout, then he would follow her advice.

Though, if he _did_ hear that voice again, he should make sure he had some new bit of information about it to deliver when he told her. If barging into the room didn’t win him a peak at the face of the mysterious singer, then he’d have to put his mind to use and find an another angle to work.

That night, as he tossed and turned and tried to find the quiet peacefulness of sleep, he dreamed he heard the voice again, singing him to sleep.

* * *

Practicing while sick never stopped being awful. His head was fuzzy and he couldn’t seem to keep up with his own body’s movements. His nose was rubbed raw from constantly blowing it, and every second he managed not to think about it was a blessing.

Natasha noticed right away, but didn’t say anything. If he was up and at practice, then he was clearly capable of being at practice.

He knew he wasn’t doing so well today. Every movement suffered from his inability to maintain a steady, reliable equilibrium, and his timing was constantly off. Mostly he just stumbled or lost his footing, but at one point he actually fell over. His leg hit the ground and suddenly his thigh felt like a piece of chewed up taffy being pulled thinner and thinner until it sagged and only barely held together. That took him out of commission for a bit, but after fifteen minutes of massaging it he was able to stand again.

It didn’t even hurt as much as his sinus headache.

When they broke for lunch, Natasha pushed some pills the size of his thumbnail into his hand.

“Take these after you eat. Stick to the stuff that’s easy on your stomach- applesauce, crackers, bananas, none of that cheesy stuff. The pills should take the edge off, but don’t expect miracles.”

“Thanks,” he said. His voice sounded weird through clogged ears and a nose he couldn’t breath through, but she didn’t comment on it.

* * *

His room was cool when he opened the door, and he just about moaned. After the stifling heat of the practice room, the perpetual draftiness of this section of the theater no longer seemed like a downside. All across his body muscles loosened, sweat dried and fresh aches began to make themselves known.

The bed dipped slightly when he sat on it and began to undress for bed. The coolness of the sheets tempted him to just drop his clothes into a pile on the floor and pass out, but he managed to resist. He couldn’t let himself grow careless and sloppy before he was even here for a full rehearsal week. He might have a role, but his position was still more tenuous than it had been before, at his old theater.

Some might find it silly to think that not keeping his living quarters neat and orderly would translate into not keeping his practice schedules straight and his performance slipping, but he had seen it happen before. Some people worked well in with clutter and relaxed organization, but Steve was not one of those people.

Still, his hands were slow to fold his clothes, and his brain skipped around and stumbled over it’s own words. Sleep pulled insistently at his eyelids.

Hopefully, tomorrow wouldn’t be quite as much of an ordeal as today.

When he finally collapsed onto his pillows, something hard and roughly hand-sized dug into the back of his neck.

The unexpected touch shocked him, and his body had already leaped off and away before his conscious brain had finished processing the unexpected feeling. All of a sudden the sleepiness that had hung like a weight from his eyes mere minutes before vanished, and a short burst of useless adrenaline flooded into his blood.

There were two small containers resting on his pillow, tied tightly together with ribbon.

Slowly, still shaky from his initial fright, he picked up the containers and examined them.

One was a boxy container with a lid that popped off. Inside was a semi-translucent, inoffensive-smelling ointment of some sort. The surface was perfectly smooth and undisturbed. Whatever it was, it was new, possibly never before opened. The instructions label on the side proclaimed the ointment a sort of cure-all for any sort of muscle ache or injury. All he had to do was rub it liberally over the areas that hurt persistently, then massage it into the skin until it was no longer visible.

The second was a thinner, taller bottle with screw-on lid. When flipped upside down, the cap had several lines drawn parallel to the rim. Inside was a dark red, slightly viscous liquid that sloshed when he shook the cup, but did not splash. The instructions told him to fill the cap to between the second and third lines and drink it for ‘mild illnesses, esp. of the lungs, throat or nasal passage.’ For more severe issues, larger doses were recommended.

He glanced back at the dent in the pillow where they had been, but there was no note or any sort of indication of the sender’s identity. Aside from this one thing, everything in the room appeared untouched.

He went to bed with whirling, tumbling thoughts, and when he woke his mind had not grown calmer.

* * *

The most basic, explainable problem was that a stranger had entered his room while he was gone and left two bottles worth of medicine. This problem could be further broken down into two smaller, simpler, but incomplete problems: A stranger had entered his room while he was away, and a stranger had given him a present with no note. When he tried to put the episode into words that wouldn’t sound embarrassing when he said them to Natasha or Sam, he tried to focus on those two points.

But in his mind, the haunting voice from the practice room got all tangled up with it, and the medicine screamed that someone had been watching him practice at the very least, had been following him at the worst, and knew about his aches and pains, and that he’d gotten a light cold from getting caught in the rain. Every time he turned a corner, he imagined he caught a glimpse of someone else turning the corner, or a shadow that shouldn’t have been there, or that he heard the voice from the practice room just at the edge of his hearing range.

He drank a one third-cap full of medicine from the thin container. It tasted sticky, like the melted runoff of a melting popsicle, but bad, like fruit ripened just to the cusp of rotting. He had to drink three whole glasses of water to chase the taste away.

Sam commented the next day that his color looked better, and offered him more substantial food than toast and banana.

That was probably the a good chance to bring up the mysteriously-appearing medicine. But when he opened his mouth, what came out was not ‘hey, a stranger broke into my room last night, presumably, based on the evidence, because they were worried about me and wanted me to get better,’ but “yeah, I guess a good night’s sleep really helped.”

“I’m glad that’s all it took to get over it. I’ve seen some real nasty diseases pop up since I started playing with the orchestra here,” Sam replied. “It’s the messed up heating, I think, but the owners don’t seem inclined to fix it. The practice rooms are always about a million degrees, and then you leave and it’s suddenly all drafty, fine one minute and cold the next. And then it’s like a freezer downstairs. That’s gotta be rough on your body, man. You know, we might be able to find someone willing to share a room with you on the third floor.”

Steve felt himself tense up just at the idea of sharing his one personal space with someone he hadn’t even known existed a few days ago.

“The basement’s fine. I’m sure I’ll adjust in time. Besides, whatever I caught doesn’t seem to be sticking around.”

“Yeah, I was pretty sure you’d say that. And you’d probably just end up getting some other illness up there anyway.”

“I used to get sick all the time, before puberty.” Sometimes people looked at his small body and thought he was frail. It almost made him want to laugh. Who could possibly look at his prepubescent self, breathing hard and soaking the sheets with sweat, and not see how really not fragile he was now?

“Well, you know, weird illnesses sometimes go around in places like this. One time, one of the saxophone guys I play with didn’t bother to clean out the inside of his sax for like five years. Not once. Algae and mites and who knows what little green things started growing inside, where it was always warm and wet, and one day it must have reached some sort of tipping point because he came down with a disease none of the doctors had ever seen before. Had to take like nine pills a day and clean his instrument with heavy-duty antibacterial soap, which warped all his pads and stuff, so he had to get all that replaced. He managed not to get anyone else sick, though, so that’s a plus.”

Steve smiled. “I’ve been sick with just about everything, but never instrument bacteria colonies. Somehow managed to miss that one.”

Their conversation riffed along similar themes, easy-going and light enough that Steve forgot all about the medicine until Sam asked about his leg.

“It’s fine,” he answered. “Mostly just a little sore and stubborn.”

“You need some sauce for it? Natasha’s got some great salves you can rub in before bed, I bet she’d tell you where she buys them.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah,” he said shortly. “Someone already gave me some.”

* * *

When a replacement bottle of muscle salve showed up on his pillow after finishing the first one, Steve decided it was time to stop wondering when he was next going to stumble over the ghost who apparently lived in the basement with him and start looking for the guy himself.

There wasn’t really an obvious place to start looking. For one thing, the basement was still a maze to him. The layout just seemed to keep on changing. The bathroom hadn’t disappeared since his first night, but other rooms were almost certainly ambulatory. Natasha seemed convinced that he just didn’t have any sense of direction, and frequently told him to stop wasting his time wandering the corridors of an abandoned, half-frozen basement. Sam always backed him up with stories of their epic quest to find a bathroom, which was nice.

Well, if there wasn’t an obvious starting point, he’d just have to pick one.

He set off determinedly for the main hallway, which started at the bottom of the main stairs up to the ground floor and continued off and out of sight. Once in the main hallway, he selected a corridor on the left hand side for his first place to look around. There was no good reason to pick that particular hall, but then again there weren’t any good reasons to pick any of them, and this corridor had a painting of a ghost haunting a victorian sitting room. Perhaps his mysterious ghost was drawn to representations of himself.

The corridor he picked was one long line of practice rooms on one side and storage rooms and closets on the other. An occasional painting of a victorian setting broke the monotony of the long, inoffensively painted walls and evenly spaced doors. All of them were painfully obvious products of a much later time. Most of the doors were shut fast, though one or two were ajar an inch, revealing a thin view of a piano or music stand inside.

Steve ducked into one of these rooms. One of his first encounters with the ghost had been in a practice room, after all. It wasn’t the worst place to look.

He slowly examined the room, feeling kind of silly but unwilling to relent just yet. The piano, he found, was bolted to the floor, as was the music stand. That struck him as strange; who would bolt down a music stand? There were never enough of those things, to here Sam tell it, and they were no good if they weren’t portable.

Silly, but not evidence of supernatural haunting.

His next stop brought him to another bathroom that he was positive hadn’t been there before. It was empty, so he moved on to another practice room, this one also with the strange bolted-down furniture, but with a shelf full of wind instrument cases instead of a piano. He ducked into a room filled with potted plants, a solid half of which had fallen over and spilled dirt everywhere, and another room that was completely empty. The next room took him hours to search- it was filled with buckets and buckets of costumes and dress-up clothes. A large closet was stuffed near to bursting with enormous, heavy period-piece dresses, and a corner was set aside with a desk, mirror, and bottle after bottle of skin and hair products. In the end, he did find quite a bit of strange stuff, including an animatronic dog the size of a Yorkshire Terrier, a dress with really weird purple stains on the back, and a painting the size of a postcard depicting an alien spaceship abducting President Lincoln.

None of that qualified as clues about the supernatural, so he moved on again.

He wandered down twisting staircases and through doors of all different styles that looked as if they’d all been installed by different people in different decades. The further down into the basement he went, the weirder the architecture choices grew.

At last he slipped through a large wooden door painted bright orange into what appeared to be an office. A large, bolted-down desk with an ancient computer and a swivel chair backed up against the wall dominated one side of the room, and an overflowing filing cabinet and a mini fridge against the other wall dominated the other side. He opened the mini fridge to see if it was still working. The inside was dark and empty, save for a bit of brown gunk around one corner. The computer, when he tried it, didn’t turn on.

One wall, strangely, was covered in framed photos. They were all in black and white, and hadn’t been dusted in a while. Upon closer inspection, each seemed to contain a picture of a group of dancers or musicians all done up in their performance makeup and costumes or holding their instruments.

There was something peculiar about them, though. It wasn’t there in all of the pictures, or even most of them. But some of the frames were marred by spiderweb cracks that made the glass difficult to look through. In the center of the cracks, where sections of glass had fallen out completely, a hole or smudge covered up someone’s face.

His forehead wrinkled in confusion. Why had these pictures been defaced?

Curiosity piqued, he began to examine each cracked frame. Some where pictures of dancers in tutus, some of dancers in formal wear, some of musicians holding string instruments, and some just of groups of people in fancy clothes. The hole wasn’t always in the same spot; sometimes someone in the back of the group had been ripped from the picture, sometimes someone kneeling in front, sometimes someone near the middle. It was always a man on the larger side, as best Steve could tell- sometimes only the face had been ruined, and the chest and body were still visible.

Were they all the same person?

Steve glanced around, then slid one of the defaced frames off the wall. He flipped it over, then dug his nails into the seam in the back until he could pop it free and pull the photo out. Carefully, so as not to mar the old ink with his fingerprints, he slid the picture free of the frame and into his pocket. Perhaps there was a digital copy of this photo floating around somewhere. It was worth looking at, even if he wasn’t sure it had anything to do with his ghost.

Suddenly there was a grumbling, heart-stopping mechanical _clank,_ and the ground began to move beneath his feet.

He scrambled away from the pictures, whose frames began to rattle against the wall. In a flash the fact that the furniture was bolted to the floor made sense, though it was the only thing about this situation that did. Wouldn’t want anything to fall in the event of the room spinning on it’s axis.

With a burst of speed he lunged for the doorway. The floor had somehow pulled back from the doorframe, and the wall had rotated to cover a solid third of the opening. The passing thought that _if I was as big as the ghost, I’d already be trapped_ flitted through his mind as he slipped through the opening at the last second.

Or, not quite. He was perhaps a tenth of a second too late.

His body made it through the door, but the wall caught on his shoulder where he’d turned sideways to fit through the gap. Suddenly pain exploded in his upper arms and the sides of his neck as the muscles there strained against the mechanical advance of the wall, pushing steadily harder and harder against his bony body.

The rough pressure of the encroaching wall pushing on his turned shoulder almost made him panic, but he managed to hold it together long enough to bend his elbow so his hands were on the right side of the whole mess, then yanked himself free. His momentum sent him tumbling though the doorway.

When he stumbled to his feet again, the wall was still moving. When he rested a fingertip against it on one side, it pulled him all the way across before subducting under the other side of the door frame. It went on like that for another minute before at last the doorway appeared again. The last of the wall disappeared beyond the edges of the frame, and then the whole thing shuttered to a stop as soon as the doorway lined up again. With a mechanical _click_ the floor shifted, then settled, once again snug against the door frame. It must have finished rotating all the way around.

Except when Steve peered inside, he was met with a very different room.

The wall of framed photographs was gone, replaced by an empty wall covered in ugly green wallpaper. A harp sat in the back corner, with a tarp over it, recognizable for its shape alone, and three battered-looking music stands had been left haphazardly around it, folded down so they looked like somber devotees bowing to the instrument. There was a small pile of sheet music sitting on a chair near the door, and the whole room was lit by a cheep, industrial-looking light fixture hanging from the ceiling. An old fashioned metronome sat on a small desk off to one side, covered in dust.

It would have looked like a normal practice room, were it not for the enormous bloodstain discoloring the carpet in the center of the room. A full grown man could lie in the middle of that stain, arms extended, and still not cover up the whole thing.

Steve shuttered.

Someone had bled a lot, enough to die from, in this practice room. A practice room that spun so that sometimes it was there, and sometimes it was not, and this doorway lead to a different room. A dark, half-panicked, half-horrified feeling twisted in his gut. Suddenly the maze-like insanity of the basement took on a more sinister quality. How many other rooms down here moved like this one? How many of them concealed something like this?

His thoughts began to chase themselves in circles. Someone had died here, and it sure seemed like it had been covered up. The dust on the metronome and the sheet over the harp- no one had been in that room for a long time. At least, they hadn’t been in there to practice. Who knew about this? How long ago had this been? What-

The hairs on the back of his neck pricked up. He wasn’t alone.

“Steve, you need to leave.” The voice from the practice room, deep and musical, whispered into his ear. “ _Please_ go. Quickly. Tell no one about this.”

He spun around but no one was there. The way the speaker said ‘please’ like he was genuinely begging made him want to recoil.

“And stop chasing ghosts,” The voice said again, this time from above. “It is not a safe pastime.” 

And then the ghost was gone again.

Steve took one last look at the nauseating blood stain, then, with that pained ‘please’ echoing in his ears, he turned and jogged back towards his room.

* * *

When he went back in the morning, the room had moved again. This time the doorway lead to a bedroom with two twin beds and a mostly-empty bookshelf.

He backed away from the door on shaking legs and tried to think of his options. Did he report this? He knew what he’d seen, but the room had shifted, and now there was no guarantee of being able to show anyone the evidence.

_Tell no one about this._

His ghost’s words echoed in his head. Those words were really what his decision came down to. Did he trust his ghost, or did he trust procedure? When you saw something, you were supposed to say something. And whatever it was Steve had seen, it was something big. Someone had most likely bled to death in that room. But the ghost had sounded almost scared when he told Steve to run.

Natasha’s words about the ghost’s connection to several murders hovered ominously at the edge of his thoughts. He didn’t want to acknowledge them. His ghost had been nothing but good to him, and had been clear that he should tell no one. But what if Natasha was right? What if, by staying silent, he was simply enabling an uncatchable killer to keep his streak going?

The obnoxious orange door mocked him. If he opened it again, what would he find on the other side?

At last, he nodded to himself, made his decision, then heaved himself to his feet and retreated to the ground floor to look for Sam.

He found him in an instrument storage room, sitting on a saxophone case and cleaning the inside of a clarinet. A shining, well-maintained saxophone lay on a pillow next to his feet, clearly having already been attended to.

He rapped twice on the open doorframe, then stepped into the room.

“Mind if I join you?”

Sam gestured expansively in front of him, as though offering the whole place.

“Be my guest.”

He turned around to ease the door shut. Something about having it open like that made his skin prickle uncomfortably in a way it wouldn’t have before last night. In his mind’s eye, shadowy figures waited outside, eavesdropping, listening to see if he’d tell anyone about the blood stain. At least it was only the basement maze where things seemed to move around. The thought of opening the door to solid wall, of trying to leave only for the room to have rotated, trapping them inside grew like a shadow at sunset in his mind.

“I saw something last night,” he said, hoping this would be one of those times when the words would just pour out without having to think about it. “And I have to talk about it with someone, but I not because I need you to do something. I don’t think there’s anything _to_ do at this point.”

“What did you see?” Sam asked. With clever fingers he twisted the uppermost section of the clarinet off, then picked up a handkerchief with a metal weight dangling from a long string sewn into one corner. He eased the metal weight into the hollow center of the clarinet, then reached down to grab it when it reemerged from the bell at the bottom like he was picking a berry off a bush. With a yank and a bit of a shake, he began to pull the handkerchief through the instrument. When the piece of cloth reemerged, it was wet and had some flecks of something brownish along one of the edges.

Steve thought of the picture hidden in his pocket of a small group of chamber musicians with a key, faceless member. The man in that picture was holding a clarinet. Did the man in that photo clean his instrument the way Sam did, or did he have some other method?

“Don’t tell Nat,” he started, “but I went out looking for that ghost.”

“The urban legend?”

“Yeah, him.”

Sam raised his eyebrows. “Huh. I wouldn’t have taken you for one of those guys blogging about their conspiracy theories and why the Zhanilov murders had to be the work of a supernatural ghost spirit or something. Man, you should read some of these theories, some of them are really off the wall.”

Steve blinked.

“I don’t know what the Zhanilov murders are.”

“It’s part of the ghost myth. The story goes that an aid to some hotshot politician came to the theater about fifty years ago, accompanied by a foreign diplomat from Russia, one of his aides, named Zhanilov, a diplomat from Ukraine, his wife, the aide to a diplomat for Belarus, and an up-and-coming California House Representative. They disappeared sometime during the performance, and later that night the aide, Zhanilov, was found dead in a ditch not far from the theater. The Californian senator was found about a week later, also dead, and they found the Ukrainian diplomat about a year later, also dead. The rest were never found.”

“And they just accused something like that on a ghost?”

Sam shook his head.

“Nah, there were investigations and all that, of course. But it was fifty years ago, you know? Forensics weren’t as good as they could be, and what little evidence there was was difficult to work with. They never closed the case. But after some time passed and they still hadn’t found a killer, it ended up part of the ghost’s mythos. Which wasn’t exactly a surprise. Legends about the ghost had existed before that.”

He shrugged and started taking the now-clean clarinet apart into its five main pieces.

“If you go to the guest entrance corridor to the Roosevelt Auditorium, there’s some pictures down there that were taken before the performance. The victims are in one of them, and every year or so you get a group of conspiracy theorists asking to look at them.”

Steve made a mental note to go see those photos.

“Huh. That actually makes everything I saw even creepier, actually.”

Sam looked up at him.

“Really? Are you going to tell me that you found a bunch of dead bodies in the basement?”

Steve smiled, but even he could feel how unconvincing it was.

“Well, so I was wandering around the basement looking for anything that might qualify as a clue to the ghost. And I did find some weird stuff. Bunch of old photos that look like they were taken here, but forever ago, but with some of the faces violently blotted out.”

Sam looked at him incredulously.

“Are you telling me you when looking for a ghost, basically signed yourself up to be the main character in a horror flick, and you found some creepily-destroyed photographs.”

“Still hanging on the wall and everything.”

“Okay, I just wanted to make sure this was as sinister an opening explanation as I thought it was,” Sam said, looking disturbed.

“No more sinister than you telling me about a couple of murders I’d never heard of that apparently took place right where I live,” Steve replied.

“Okay, okay, I get it. So what did you do when you saw the horror-movie photographs?”

“You know, this part isn’t actually the part I need to talk to you about,” he said. Sam’s eyebrows flew to his hairline.

“What do you mean, the creepy horror-movie photographs aren’t the creepy part?”

“They were just one detail! There was other stuff, too. Like, all the furniture was bolted to the floor. Even the music stands.”

“Bolted down music stands? You’re telling me that you found a room with _bolted down music stands?”_

“I know, I thought it was weird too.”

Sam shook his head in bemusement and coiled the weighted string around the handkerchief and set it back down on the case next to him.

“Can you hand me that box with the red top and the falcon sticker?”

“Sure.”

The instrument storage room was bigger than many storage rooms Steve had seen in his life, but it was so full of small wind instrument cases and enormous tuba cases and everything in between that it was difficult even to cross the room. It was like a hurricane had come through, depositing musical debris throughout the room and destroying any semblance of order. If he stretched a bit, Steve could grab the edge of a contrabass clarinet and pull himself close enough to grab the box without having to get up from his seat on an stool that had undoubtedly originally been some sort of set piece. Once he got his fingers hooked around the handle, he pulled the box over and deposited it in Sam’s lap.

“Thanks man.” He flipped the lid open, revealing a neat assortment of tiny screwdrivers. He removed one, inspected three small characters printed near the base, then nodded definitively and began using it to tighten the screws on the middle section of the instrument. He radiated the kind of calm Steve wished he had right then.

“I found a blood stain. A big one. Like, _somebody probably died here_ big.”

Sam looked up, face blank with surprise.

“What?”

“Yeah, and I found out why we had such a hard time finding the bathroom that first night. The room with the blood stain? It _moved._ Rotated somehow so that when I opened the door again, I opened up to a very different room. One without incriminating evidence.”

“Jesus.”

“It was pretty old,” He assured him. “I don’t know how old, but pretty old. I don’t know if the rooms are on some sort of schedule or if there’s a person somewhere directing it. I can’t necessarily produce evidence, not if the room moves like that when I try to show it to somebody. But I just felt like I had to tell _someone.”_

“No, I get it. That’s a messed up thing to see.”

“You believe me?”

He’d been scared that he wouldn’t. It wasn’t like there weren’t a bunch of good reasons not to believe him; the whole story would have sounded insane to him had he not been there to experience it.

“Yeah man, I remember that nonsense with the bathrooms the night you came here. And even if you were pulling my leg, what’s the point? You’re not asking me to do anything with this information. In fact, you specifically told me at the beginning of this conversation that you were counting on me to _not_ do anything with this information.”

“Thanks, Sam.” He smiled, and got a smile in return.

“I guess there’s some truth to the urban myths. I mean, the disappearances and murders and stuff are all public record, but whenever you think about them you think about the ghost, and it just sort of makes you laugh the whole thing off. Are you sure you don’t want to try and tell someone?”

Steve shrugged. Sam probably wouldn’t think ‘the ghost told me not to’ was a very good reason. Instead, he changed the subject and hoped his friend wouldn’t notice.

“Hey, where did you get such tiny screwdrivers? I’ve never seen anything that small at the hardware store.”

“You wouldn’t have. These are specially made for stuff like my clarinet and saxophone. Little tiny screws. If you’re really dedicated, you can do it with a paperclip, but I prefer to have actual tools when I do maintenance.”

After a few more minutes of light conversation that did not features mysterious murders, blood stains, or vandalized horror-movie photos, Steve left Sam to finish his maintenance and headed out to find the audience entrance to the Roosevelt Auditorium to see if there was anything there worth seeing.

* * *

It was definitely worth seeing.

Steve found the auditorium all right- it wasn’t like the basement, where rooms moved of their own accord. Just like Sam had said, there was a photo gallery along the wall, showcasing staged photos of performers and famous patrons.

Perhaps it had been placed in the center for it’s historical value, or it’s gossip value, or because like Sam said, the theater was used to people showing up to take a look at it. It didn’t matter. Steve caught sight of it and all of a sudden it was like there was cotton in his ears. Slowly, he walked closer to it, letting his eyes rest on each little detail, just to be sure that it was what he thought it was.

Trembling fingers slid the defaced photograph from his pocket and held it up next to the pristine photo.

The display photo was bigger, and free of wrinkles, and was hung in a much nicer frame than the one downstairs. And, of course, it was completely unblemished. Aside from that, the two photos were perfectly identical.

The face that had been ripped belonged to a tall, broad-chested dancer. He was smiling, but his eyes were dazed, like he was confused about what was going on.

The same man, he quickly found, was present in many of the pictures, though he wasn’t always dressed as a dancer. After about the fourth one, realization his him like a freight train. He’d seen these photos before- last night, in the moving practice room.

He was staring at the face of his ghost.

* * *

One morning not long after Steve discovered the face of his ghost, the theater was awoken to police sirens and news vehicles. Chaos reigned; performers who didn’t know what was going on tried to walk through areas that had been designated part of a crime scene, reporters tried to get statements from the theater managers, but the theater managers were busy talking to the police. Passers-by on the street slowed as they walked past, craning their necks to get a look. Men and women in and out of uniform swarmed the theater. It was unclear for the longest time if they were going to go into people’s personal quarters, or if they even legally could. Then there were the people who wandered down into the basement searching for clues and inevitably got horribly turned around. Steve helped three such people find their way back to the main staircase before he figured out what was going on.

There had been a jazz concert the night before. Steve had been down in a large dance room he’d discovered one floor down from him in the basement, complete with a bar and a wall of mirrors, before most of the audience members had arrived, and had been in bed before they’d left, so he hadn’t paid much mind to it.

However, a prominent journalist had been in attendance last night. It was the last time anyone had seen them.

The police had been called about the woman’s disappearance around midnight. Her body had been found by a janitor in the theater’s first floor bathroom at about six o’clock that morning.

Seemingly overnight the myth of the Stern Theater Ghost was on everybody’s lips.

* * *

Later that day, when things had begun to quiet down a little, Steve slipped away to search again for the ghost. He had some questions, and he’d prefer not to ask them sooner rather than later.

Evidently his ghost also wanted to talk. Steve hadn’t even been searching for twenty minutes when his voice came from out of the blue.

“You should stop looking for me.”

Steve whipped around, but the corridor was empty. Only the horrible paintings gazed back at him through the gloom from their places on the wall.

“Why would I do that?” He said.

“Because I’m a ghost,” the voice from the practice room replied. Steve shuddered, then twirled around in a full circle. There was no one on either end of the corridor. A light breeze made his shirt flutter and chilled his sweat against his skin.

“I’m not afraid of ghosts.”

“You should be.”

The voice was beautiful, rich and rough and far too warm. Ghosts’ voices should be cold like the grave. Like the cool draft blowing lightly against him like a sigh.

“What’s your name, ghost?”

The ghost chuckled softly. It was the sort of laugh that didn’t require you to open your mouth at all. Steve had to resist the urge to reach out and start running his hands over the walls, hoping to touch what he couldn’t see. A sound like that didn’t carry very far.

“Questions like that really don’t do much to convince me that you’re going to stop looking for me.” A tired note of amusement pulled up the edges of the ghost’s words. It made the corners of Steve’s mouth turn up in response.

“That’s because I’m not.”

“You little punk.” Closer, like he was right behind Steve. This time he went still instead of whipping around.

“I might be little, but I can still kick your ass, dangerous or no.”

The ghost laughed. He was closer still, close enough that Steve wondered if he could reach out and touch him.

“Mmm, I’d love it if that were the case. You are strong, I’m not saying you aren’t. I’ve seen you practicing. Some of those women you lift are bigger than you are. But that impressive strength won’t save you from me, and I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Then don’t hurt me.”

“I hope I won’t.” The ghost’s voice was rougher and weaker, but no further away. He could have sworn the ghost was leaning over his shoulder, whispering straight into his ear, but surely he would have felt such close proximity. “But I might have to, if you keep looking for me.”

“Why?” The malformed composers stared back at him with flat, unseeing, malformed eyes. Steve imagined them looking over his shoulder at the ghost, but didn’t dare turn around himself. “If you don’t want to hurt me, then don’t.”

“If it were that simple, I’d have let you see my face long ago.”

A shiver of heat rolled down Steve’s spine and briefly chased away the chill of the drafty corridor. That breathy voice made him want to shut his eyes and let himself be pliant in the way he never felt like he could be. It made him want to slowly release the tension built up over a day of rehearsal, muscle by muscle, and let the owner of the voice take the ointments he’d left as presents on Steve’s bed and rub them into Steve’s skin himself.

“You still haven’t told me your name.”

The ghost paused before replying. For a moment, Steve almost thought he’d fled without a word.

“I don’t have one.”

“What do you mean you don’t have one?”

“Personal names are a people thing, and I’m not a person.”

Steve scoffed. The sound was unnatural in the slow, dark space the ghost had carved out for them. For the first time he became consciously aware of the thrum of tension in the air. He wanted so badly to turn around.

“If you don’t have a name, then I’ll have to make one up for you. I can’t keep calling you ‘the ghost’ in my head.”

“You could just stop thinking about me,” the ghost said with playful exasperation.

“Or you could just tell me,” Steve said. “Come on, it’s polite.”

The ghost paused. The chill in the air grew steadily more intense.

“I have no name,” the ghost said at last.

“Really? No one’s over had to refer to you before?” The words were light on Steve’s tongue, like a tap against a door you know is stuck fast but you still hope will swing open at a touch the way it should.

“No one has needed to. I am a tool, and people don’t need to talk to their tools.” The ghosts rumbled words were like cold stones shifting against each other. “And you shouldn’t try to talk to me either. In fact, you should ask to move out of the basement, pick a room closer to the other dancers and cease coming down here trying to find anything but shadows and abandoned rooms.”

“I’ll take that under advisement.” Steve’s heart began to thud in his chest the way it did when he was a scrawny, sickly kid whose body was so small he could feel his own organs working. It was completely different from the way it beat after a long workout or a vigorous performance. It felt like sickness and spite. “But you still need a name.”

“Steve,” the ghost sighed. His melodic voice infused Steve’s name with music, and Steve was suddenly gripped by the intense desire to hear him say it again.

“If you don’t have a name, then I’ll just have to give you one. And I’ll give you an awful one. Trust me, you’ll wish you’d just given me a name.” His eyes trailed along the wall, glancing at the ugly portrait series that decorated this stretch of wall- presidents, instead of composers- and hoped that his wandering eye would catch a glimpse of his ghost.

Amusement colored the ghost’s voice.

“Now I want to hear this terrible name.”

Steve’s eye caught on the portrait of President James Buchanon.

“Alrighty then, Buchanon, do you mind if I ask you something?”

The ghost exploded into laughter. It was a bright, happy sound, like surf crashing against a pristine beach. Steve immediately knew he’d do anything to hear it again.

“That’s such a terrible name, oh my god!”

“You’re right, it’s a little long, isn’t it? How about Bucky for short?”

Once again the ghost burst into delighted laughter.

“Yes, that one. Call me Bucky.”

“Well Bucky, can I ask you something?”

The bubbling joy leaked out of Bucky’s voice, turning it flat and emotionless.

“You don’t have to ask, Stevie. I killed that journalist.”

The words were like a knife in his gut.

“Why?” he stuttered. “Why would you kill her? What could she have possibly done to you?”

“Nothing.” His musical voice was now cold and toneless. It sent shivers down Steve’s spine. “I wasn’t even conscious that I was doing it. They made me. I couldn’t stop them, just like I couldn’t stop them all the times before.”

Suddenly, a cold hand with a steel grip clamped down on Steve’s shoulder.

“Steve, listen to me. I’m dangerous. Being connected to me is dangerous. This whole theater is dangerous. This place isn’t what it seems. You need to get out, make a clean get away while you can. Stop looking for me, Stevie. I’m not strong enough to stay away from you, so it’s going to have to be you who stays away from me.”

And just like that, he was gone.

“Like hell,” Steve said to an empty hallway, and went back to his room.

* * *

He was about to stick his foot in his dance shoes when a familiar voice behind him said “Don’t.” It was the voice from the practice room, but darker and harsher. A command instead of a song. It sounded like the man was right behind him, practically resting his chin on Steve’s shoulder.

He froze, then whirled around, but there was no one behind him.

Still, he nodded seriously to the empty air, because it didn’t feel right not to acknowledge the voice he’s been so worked up over. Natasha caught the movement and raised an eyebrow at him, but he didn’t answer her question. They were not the only ones sitting in corners of the dressing room, sticking themselves into practice clothes and last-minute reviewing the choreo. Even if no one was paying attention to them, he’d have to get as close as the mysterious man had gotten to him if he wanted to speak to her without being overheard.

His shoes sat innocently on the floor in front of him. He glanced behind him again, but once again there was nothing there but empty stools and a curtain separating this room from another.

He picked up one shoe and brought it up close to his face. Something inside caught the light briefly, like a stray piece of glitter. When he squinted, strange shadows appeared deeper in the shoe itself, where the toes would sit. He gave it a light shake.

Shards of glass, each no bigger than a fingernail, make _clink clink_ sounds as they collide with each other. It almost sounds like wine glasses tapping lightly together in a polite toast.

He stared at them. Their clinking echoed over and over in his head, until it sounded like row after row of glass windows shattering. A chill went down his back.

Someone had put glass in his shoes.

He’d heard of dancers being so desperate for a part that they sabotaged anyone else who got it, but it had always been a distant, unreal thing. A wild story. And yet here he was, with glass in his shoe. Had he not been warned, those shards would have embedded themselves in the soles of his feet, and he would have been in no position to dance.

His eyes darted around the dressing room. Who would have done it? Who here wanted his part so bad they would attack him to get it? What if they didn’t stop here? Would they leave traps for him in his own bedroom? It wouldn’t be difficult to find out which room he slept in, if they didn’t already know. The memory of coming into his room to find the medicine from the ghostly voice waiting on his pillow, this time with a more sinister tinge to it. What if it hadn’t been medicine waiting for him on the pillow?

He could feel his thoughts spiraling, but he couldn’t seem to stop. Each thought collided with the one after it so that it was difficult to think clearly.

All of a sudden, one of the other dancers shouted in surprise.

Everyone looked up, including Steve, to see bloody glass raining like confetti from the ceiling. The shards were bigger and easier to see than the ones in Steve’s shoes, so everyone in the room could easily track each falling piece as it fell to the floor.

For a moment there was silence. Then the other dancers found their voices and the shouting began. People ran towards the door in a panic, trying to escape the falling glass, only to realize that the floor in front of them was already covered in shards. Some hopped up on benches near the wall, furthest away from the shower of twinkling shards, while others began rummaging through their bags for something to cover their feet with. Those who had already gotten their shoes on took advantage of their protected feet and fled the room.

Steve stood as though hypnotized by the falling shards. They flashed against the bright light from the rows of bulbs along the ceiling that lit the room, half-blinding him. It made it difficult, but not impossible, for him to focus on the shape that stood above the lights. There was a man there, quiet as a corpse and dressed in dark colors that served to make him even more difficult to see with the blazing lights between them. One moment he thought he’d made out the curve of the ghost’s face, but it melted away behind the blazing bulbs again.

He could have sworn that the man was looking right at him.

And then the ghost disappeared into thin air. Or perhaps not; the ceiling of the dressing room was rather tall, but it was difficult to see much past the row of bulbs. For all he could tell, the man had disappeared into a perfectly visible hole in the wall. The important thing was that he had been there when the glass was falling, possibly even just before, and now he was gone.

The rain of glass stopped as abruptly as it had begun.

The dressing room was as quiet as the few tentative seconds after a thunderstorm ends, when everyone’s waiting to be sure that it’s well and truly over and not just taking a break. Then the whispers broke out. Within seconds the room became a den of hissing snakes as each dancer who hadn’t fled said something to her neighbor in a quick, breathy voice that was too open to be a whisper but didn’t have the vocal power of a fully voiced word. They slid from friend to friend, whispering loudly to each other and relaying what the others had already said. Fear hung heavy in the air.

Steve looked back down at his shoes. He needed to put them on if he was going to walk out of here, but the memory of a the glass glinting dully weighed down his arms rather than lending them strength. He forced his fingers to work faster. He couldn’t just stand here in a stupor when someone had been through his things and had placed a handful of little glass shards in his shoes, all the way to the front of the shoe where the toes went and the arch of the foot curved, where they’d be positioned to stab into his soft feet and fill his shoes up with blood.

Someone had tried to hurt him. Someone had tried to sabotage him. Someone had snuck into his things and stuck glass in his shoes while he wasn’t looking, and then a ghost had made glass rain from the ceiling. His ghost was in the dressing room. Was his ghost always in the dressing room? Or did he only show up for special occasions, like dancers getting sabotaged? The singer in the practice room, the medicine, the eyes he felt on his neck- had he encountered this ghost before?

His thoughts chased each other around in his head until the room was spinning. He didn’t know what to do next. Lots of people had fled, but did that mean he should flee? He needed to get out of the room, probably, along with everyone else, and stay out until the glass was cleaned up. But if he left the room, where was he supposed to go? Go to the rehearsal stage like nothing had happened?

“Steve.”

Natasha’s voice broke through the haze of his shock, and he realized that his shoes were on and his bag was over his shoulder. It was like his body knew to flee, even if his mind was still undecided about what it wanted to do.

“Yes?”

“Come on. We’ve got to go to the practice stage. Someone called the janitor, they’re gonna clean this up, but we need to leave first.”

She glanced suspiciously up at the ceiling. Steve must have been a little too obvious about his staring.

“Okay,” he nodded. “Are the owners on site? Do they know?”

“I believe at least one of them came in last night. His room was all lit up, and I saw the assistant he always travels with coming from the kitchens with his favorite soup.”

She grabbed his hand and steered him towards the door.

“Did you see what happened?” She asked once they were out in the hallway. “You looked like you saw something on the ceiling.”

The ghost’s silhouette against the hot lights flashed through his mind. The single word the man had spoken rang through his head like a warning bell. _Don’t._

“No. I was just wondering where the glass was coming from.”

Should he tell her about the glass in his shoe? Was there anyway to tell her about it that didn’t involve telling her that he was convinced that the ghost was looking after him? It didn’t feel right to rat out the man who had saved him from a shoe full of blood and the loss of his first role at the theater. But the glass falling from the ceiling could have hurt somebody, and no matter where Steve looked he hadn’t seen any source for the broken glass. Had his mysterious ghost just had a bucket full of broken glass to empty over the dressing room? And was it just a coincidence that the ghost had saved him from a glass-based attack only to attack everyone with glass?

_Don’t._

What was the last thing he’d even told her about the ghost? Had he told her anything beyond that second practice, when he’d asked her about the singer in the empty practice room?

His head felt like it was spinning. Natasha’s hand wrapped around his was like an anchor, keeping him from spinning out of control and falling over. He had been attacked, everyone had been attacked, his ghost had saved him, his ghost kept bloody glass on hand to throw at people, and he still hadn’t even seen the ghost’s face.

And then all of a sudden the thick, heavy door to the main practice stage. Had they really been walking for long enough to get here already?

Natasha put a steadying hand on his shoulder before leading him out onto the stage, where most of the other permanent resident dancers sat in little groups, twittering like flocks of birds in springtime. Someone had turned on the stage lights, and their intensity made Steve’s vision swim slightly. He was grateful for Natasha’s steadying hold.

A man whose face struck Steve as looking like smug greed given physical form sat in one of the front row seats, speaking in low tones to a rat-faced man holding a notebook.

“Is that the owner?” He asked Natasha. She pulled on his wrist until he sank down next to her on the floor towards the back of the stage.

“Yes. Senator Stern. A patron of the arts known for taking a personal interest in his DC properties, including this theater.” She spoke like she was reading from a file. “The day to day stuff is handled by other people, of course, but he’s around often enough.”

Steve took a harder look at the man, committing his face to memory, and then turned back to Natasha.

“Are we just supposed to sit here and wait?”

“I guess.” She shrugged.

“For how long?”

“I assume until they figured out what happened.”

“We’ll get behind on practice.” He thought about dancing in soft, perfect shoes without glass in them. Today he was supposed to work on the choreography for a section with a dancer named Ashley, who he was going to lift for several full measure counts in act two.

“I’m sure they’ll come up with something before the entire day is wasted,” Natasha replied.

* * *

When the owner finally called for the dancers’ attention, an hour had passed.

“Good news, folks. It looks like some of the lights just overheated a bit and shattered the glass. We’ll be getting those replaced in the next couple of days, and it shouldn’t happen again. The janitor has told me that everything is cleaned up and you can return for you things now.”

Their choreographer slipped in smoothly and began handing out instructions and a modified schedule for the day’s practice. A couple of low whispers drifted to Steve’s ears- _what about the blood? Why was there blood on the glass if it was a burst bulb?_ \- but for the most part the other dancers calmly accepted the strangeness of the whole thing and quietly followed the choreographer’s instructions.

He thought about giving volume to those whispers. Then he thought about medicine on his pillow and followed his fellows’ example.

When he returned to the dressing room, the glass had disappeared from his shoes.

* * *

The problem with practicing pair dances alone was that you had to just sort of fake the parts where you interacted with your partner.

Still, Steve kept at it. After the incident in the dressing room earlier that day, he had to obsess over something, and he couldn’t obsess over the glass anymore. So he might as well obsess over his upcoming performance.

Natasha had approached him about it yesterday when she noticed the bags under his eyes, but he told her he was just having trouble sleeping. If she or Sam knew, they’d probably- well, he didn’t know what they’d say. But they probably wouldn’t approve of this.

His legs ached, deep and near-painful from the hours he’d already put into repeating this set over and over again. He was sweating, and his sweatpants were sticking uncomfortably to his skin. Each time he leaped, he leaped a little lower. Each time he spun, he spun a little slower. Perhaps in another hour or two, he’d finally be tired enough that his body would overrule his mind and finally go to sleep.

He finished the set, legs trembling but straight and arms heavy as lead but still raised above his head. He let his head fall forward for a second, then prepared to start again.

“Isn’t that enough for tonight, Steve?” Came a familiar, amused voice.

Steve turned slowly. There, in the shadowed corner, stood a dark figure. He stood slowly, straightening up and up and up until he towered a full head and a half over Steve.

“I assure you, none of the other dancers have practiced this much. You partner for the set certainly hasn’t.”

“I can’t sleep,” he said with a deliberately casual shrug.

The shadow detached from the rest and walked slowly towards him. Bucky’s body was obviously powerful and solid, even from across the room. Steve found he couldn’t take his eyes off of him. Unlike the other times when Bucky had come to him, this time he made no effort to hide himself or disappear now that Steve was looking.

“You certainly can’t sleep if you’re not in bed, haven’t brushed your teeth, and are still in your practice clothes.”

Bucky continued to advance towards him with that same slow, confident, steady gait. Every step brought him further out of the shadows.

“Maybe I don’t want to sleep.”

“You’ll want to have slept when you get to tired to continue dancing in the morning, or when you get sick again, or when that blister on the bottom of your foot finally pops.”

Two more steps brought Bucky directly into the light.

Steve gasped. The soft, weak light of the empty practice stage fell on Bucky’s face like the glow of the setting sun. It illuminated the soft waves of hair that fell to his shoulders, the rippling muscles that strained against his skin-tight clothing, his intense, dark eyes that shone like the gaze of a prowling wolf. Last of all it glinted dully of a metal collar and a matching metal arm that whirred quietly as the plates flexed. He stood, rooted to the spot, as his ghost strode closer and closer, until there were only inches between them.

“Come to bed, Steve. You need to sleep. You’ve done all the practice you can by yourself.”

The finality of the words broke Steve’s trance. Before Bucky could melt back into the shadows, he reached out and grabbed his hand. He didn’t know what to say or do to make him stay, but he had to do something. This was the closest Bucky had ever come. He couldn’t waste this opportunity.

“Then practice with me. As my partner.”

Bucky paused, eyes considering.

“I am not as familiar with the choreography as your real partner would be.”

“Then I’ll help you. It’ll be like a review.”

Pale lips stretched into a small smile.

“Is that so?”

Steve nodded emphatically.

“It’s always important to know what your partner is supposed to do.”

“Well then,” Bucky smiled wider and reached out to touch Steve’s cheek. “I guess I should help you with that.”

* * *

Dancing with Bucky was perfect, and Steve knew immediately that he would never dance this well again, not after a full night of sleep or with a partner who knew the steps. There was just something about the way he kept his body turned toward Steve, even when they were on opposite sides of the stage. Whenever they pulled back together, Bucky’s skin against his felt like a pleasant electricity. The metal arm flexed and rippled powerfully, drawing Steve’s eyes and making him shiver with the urge to stroke a finger down the length of it.

At first Steve had wondered how well this could work with him still dancing the man’s part. Bucky was both taller and wider than him, and solid. Steve could never dance like this with him in front of an audience- they made too comic a pair. Whenever Bucky leaned elegantly away from him, he had to lean until his hair nearly brushed the floor to let Steve lean over him, and when they spun he could feel those powerful muscles working against his palms to keep himself spinning according to Steve’s lead. But Bucky didn’t laugh or tell him to leave out those parts. Instead, he smiled soft and bright, like he enjoyed Steve’s arms around his waist and Steve’s palms leading him through the next steps.

By the time they came to the lift, Steve was smiling as brightly as Bucky. With a powerful heave, he wrapped his hands around Bucky and raised him up off the floor, above his head, up and up until his smiling face blocked the light above save for the stray rays that filtered through his hair and shone off his arm.

Lifting him was much more demanding than lifting his tiny, tooth-pick thin partner was, and he was already word out from his obsessive session following the glass, but the euphoria of Bucky finally out in the light and in reach lent him strength to hold him up and continue to spin even as Bucky twisted above him, doing the splits and bending his back like a gracefully arching swan’s neck and trusting Steve to be able to hold him up.

As the music of the set drew to a close, and the last, slowest measures began to fade into pianissimo, and then into silence, Steve struggled to hold onto that euphoria. His ghost had finally let him see his face, had let him touch him, had danced with him. Even if Bucky drew away now, this was the best night he’d had since coming to the theater. Probably the best night he’d had in years.

“Don’t go,” he found himself saying anyway. He reached out and wrapped his arms tightly around Bucky, tight enough to feel the rise and fall of his chest. “Please don’t go.”

“Okay,” Bucky said soothingly. “I’ll stay for a little while longer. Can you do something for me in return?”

Steve nodded against his beefy chest. He could feel Bucky smiling in response.

“Go to your room. Change into your nightclothes, wash up, and deal with your blister. When you’re done, I’ll stay with you until you fall asleep.”

“That’s hardly an incentive.”

“Then I’ll just have to help you sleep.”

* * *

Once Steve was in bed, Bucky lay down next to him and began to sing softly. Though Steve fought it, that haunting, beautiful voice that he had heard so often in his dreams since coming to the theater slowly, gently pulled him down into peaceful sleep.

* * *

Later that night, some sound roused him from sleep well after the witching hour had passed. At first he thought it was a whine from one of the pipes, but the sound wasn’t quite right. He glanced around for Bucky, but he had already gone. Blearily, he rubbed his eyes and slipped out of bed. Whatever it was, it just kept going and going. Not constant or steady, like a dripping tap or something, but continuous.

When he opened his door and stuck his head out in the hall, the noise came a little clearer. A siren? No, it was too irregular to be a siren.

His footsteps were soft against the floor, nearly drowned out by the noise. He followed it out into the hall, then down deeper into the basement level, away from the stairway up to the main floor. The sound grew clearer, and a horrible feeling of empty-stomached horror began to dissipate his lingering sleepiness as the sound resolved itself.

Somebody was screaming.

He broke out into a run, not knowing where he was going or where to look. The corridors blurred into each other as he whipped past them. He didn’t know where to go, he wasn’t even sure where he _was_ , just that the further he ran, the further away from the base of the main stairs he got, the louder the screams got. He flicked on the lights as he went, leaving a trail of illumination behind him. Hopefully that would be enough to find his way back.

_He was supposed to be the only one down here. Him and the ghost. Could you hurt a ghost?_

“Hello?” He called out. “What’s going on? Where are you?”

His voice echoed down the corridor and into the darkness as though into a deep, mysterious cave. A sudden silence fell.

He stuttered to a stop.

“Where are you?” He called again. The silence remained.

The feeling of dread in his stomach intensified. He whipped his head around, looking for anything but more doors and corridors and horrible paintings, but there was nothing.

He stood there, heart beating a million miles an hour, waiting for something to materialize out of the darkness, but nothing happened. The darkness ahead of him took on an eerie quality, as though it concealed horrors and if he took even one more step forward, he would come face to face with them.

He thrust his chin out defiantly at the darkness, and marched out into it. The screaming had stopped, but whoever had been screaming had to still be down here. What kind of person would he be if he let his own horror and fear turn him around and force him back to his room?

As he searched, throwing open doors and calling down hallways, he thought back to the blood on the glass in the dressing room.

Ghosts didn’t bleed. And Bucky was far too solid to be a ghost.

* * *

The realization crept up on him that he should tell someone about this, and that it would probably be better if he wasn’t the only one running around looking for _his ghost_ whoever had been screaming.

The stairs creaked and groaned as he tore up them, muscles pumping in desperation. The icy chill gave way to warmer air as he emerged from the basement. He cast about for someone, anyone who was up at this hour. Someone else must have heard the screams, right? Even if they hadn’t, he had to alert someone.

But the stillness of the night was not broken by so much as a scampering mouse.

Finally he ran up another flight of stairs to the second floor, where Natasha slept. He had to slow down enough to read the numbers on the doors, but he was still making now effort to soften his footfalls. So he shouldn’t have been surprised when he went to knock and instead his fist met air as Natasha opened the door.

“Steve,” she said. Her eyes ran over him, assessing and analytical. “What is it?”

“Come quickly. Someone was screaming, just now, in the basement. I went running, but I couldn’t find whoever it was before the screams got cut off.”

Her eyes widened. Quickly she stepped out into the hall and shut the door, then grabbed his arm and began pulling him back down the hallway and away from the other rooms.

“You heard this just now?” She half-whispered as they turned the corner.

“Yes. It woke me up, but when I went looking for whoever it was that was doing the screaming, I came up empty. I swear it’s like the rooms change around down there.”

She took on a more and more predatory aura as they went, until he could feel her muscles tensing and twisting like a cat’s every time he so much as bumped into her. Her eyes had gone cold and sharply _present_ at some point. It was the look of a creature for whom there was no past or future or meaningful passage of time; there was just the hunt, the need to perform perfectly in this moment or she wouldn’t taste blood.

Steve wondered for a second how his friend had come to pick ballet as her calling.

The basement was as silent as a tomb and just as cold. The echoes of those pained screams rang incessantly in Steve’s ears, but no matter how he strained his ears the only sound he could hear was the sound of a slight breeze whistling through a keyhole in on of the doors lining the hall.

“Did you call the police?” Natasha asked suddenly, and the intensity of her gaze sent his heart skipping in his chest.

“It didn’t even occur to me,” he admitted. “My previous theater didn’t like it when people called the cops.”

She nodded brusquely. “They usually don’t.”

“Should I have?”

“I don’t know.” Her lips pursed, and her eyes slid off him again to scan the hallway again.

“Should I file a report with the theater manager?”

“Absolutely not.”

Just like that he was the object of her attention again.

“Do not go to the theater manager. Do not talk to the other ballerinas. Do not bring it to the owners’ attention. Calling the police could have mixed results, but there are no good outcomes if you go the the theater manager.”

“It sounds like you have some pieces to the puzzle that I’m missing,” Steve said slowly. He could feel his jaw tensing up, but he couldn’t seem to relax it.

For a long moment, the only sound was the drum-pound beating of his heart.

“I have some dangerous pieces of the puzzle,” she said at last. “And I believe you have some dangerous pieces of your own. I can’t tell you all of mine, and I don’t think I should have all of yours. But Steve, I don’t think one of the other ballerinas put glass in your shoes. Or, if they did, I don’t think it was their idea.”

“What do you mean?” His world was slipping sideways, breaking up like a weak sheet of ice, and he couldn’t see how to hold it together. Someone ( _he didn’t know it was his ghost, how could he know it was his ghost, he lived alone in the basement with his ghost_ ) was screaming bloody murder in the middle of the night, someone had attacked him and he didn’t know who, and now Natasha didn’t want him to talk to the theater manager?

“I think,” she said with all the ominous darkness of a witch reciting a prophecy, “that senator Stern or someone in his employ here at the theater wanted you to get hurt. I have some suspicions about why, but I need a little more information on a different front before I know for sure. But I’m almost positive they intended for you to get hurt and to go seek medical treatment, and then they intended to use this as an excuse to keep you.”

“Why do you think that?” He didn’t want to know. Ice cracking, it was cold enough down here that it was all he could do not to imagine ice cracking with him still on it, drifting away-

“Because I believe in the story of the ghost that lives in the basement,” she said so quietly he almost couldn’t here her over the sound of blood in his ears. “Not that he’s a ghost, but that he’s the one behind the killings a few years ago, and the ones a few years before that, and the ones a few years before that. And because it is very strange for someone like you to have been hired into the permanent troupe, unless someone somewhere had an ulterior motive. And because the further I dig, the more connections I find between Stern and the murders.”

Steve turned slowly. Her face was a mask of vicious determination.

“Being a ballerina isn’t your real job, is it?”

“No,” she said. “Fictional though ghosts may be, the murders that have happened here certainly are not. Whoever is doing the killings, they’ve left a bunch of loose ends behind. Family members, friends, children. It was only a matter of time before one of them struck back.”

“Did you know the journalist?”

“No. I was on this job before she died. I’m working with a man named Tony Stark. His father was one of the mysterious victims of the ‘ghost’ several years ago. He’s like me. He thinks Stern is dirty business.”

She paused, and took a deep breath.

“Let me know if you hear something again.”

He nodded dumbly as she turned and ascended the stairs back towards her room. As soon as she was out of sight, he turned and tore off down the hall. He _had_ to find Bucky.

* * *

In the end, Bucky found him.

He was dazed, wide-eyed and shaky, when he finally crossed paths with Steve. His hair floated as though electrified, and his muscles seemed to be rebelling en mass. He couldn’t seem to focus on Steve’s face when he spoke.

“Steve, you have to get out of here. As soon as you can.”

“No, Bucky, I already told you, I’m not going anywhere. What happened to you? I heard screaming, I was so worried!”

He traced a finger over the collar.

“They were punishing me for warning you about the glass.”

“What?”

Bucky sighed in resignation.

“Come with me. I’ve got something to show you.”

* * *

Bucky moved through the lower halls with complete confidence. Steve followed him and tried not to take his eyes off him. He didn’t _think_ that Bucky would let him get lost, but he’d gotten turned around enough down here that he didn’t want to chance it.

Bucky lead him unerringly downward. He guided Steve down long, winding flights of stairs, down ramps and spiral staircases and rope ladders, and took defunct-looking elevators when they found them. They had to duck through oddly-shaped doors in side-corridors that branched off other side-corridors, go through what initially appeared to be normal bedrooms but which turned out to have more than one door, and at one point go through a trap door hidden under a rug to find them, but there was always another staircase.

It was like the theater descended all the way down into hell.

“How far down does this building go?” He asked. “Shouldn’t we have hit the foundation by now? What kind of theater needs this many floors?”

“This isn’t a normal theater, Steve.” Bucky replied. He smiled at Steve over his shoulder. If his eyes hadn’t crinkled pleasantly, it might have been a snarl. “But you already knew that.”

“I know there’s weird stuff going on,” he said, “but so far that amounts to floor plans changing on me. And, of course, a _dashing_ ghost who goes out of his way to do nice things for a little ballerina like me.”

Bucky huffed out a laugh.

“I’d wait to call me dashing, if I were you. Until we reach the Statue Room, at least.”

“And how long is that going to take? I swear we’ve gone down twice as many staircases as I’ve seen in the entire upstairs, including those little three-step things to get to the podiums and stuff.”

“The building up above is like the tip of an iceberg,” Bucky replied. “It looks like a single, normal building, big enough for a theater but not big enough to raise any eyebrows. But down here, where no one goes, it’s like the roots of a mushroom spreading out and down.”

“Why have it if no one comes down here?”

“This place wasn’t always a theater.” Bucky said ominously. “I’m not even the most interesting thing forgotten down here.”

The air grew colder and colder as they descended, until Steve’s breaths came in puffs of steam thick enough to obscure Bucky only a few steps away. His skin pebbled up, and he found himself rubbing it vigorously to try and stimulate some warmth. His small frame shuddered like a droplet of water hanging from the tip of a melting icicle.

“Don’t quit on me yet, Stevie,” Bucky said. He seemed perfectly at ease in the chill, though perhaps that had something to do with his full-body black outfit. It almost certainly offered him more protection that Steve’s gauzy practice tights.

“I’m not quitting, I’m just cold,” Steve said. He felt vaguely proud that he got the full sentence out without letting his teeth chatter.

Bucky smiled playfully over his shoulder at him, like a mischievous spirit. “I think there’s a room around here with some old winter costumes. How do you feel about fake fancy fur coats?”

“No detours. You said it was important that you showed me this thing in the basement, whatever it is. I’m not getting sidetracked just because you want to play mysterious, gallant ghost.”

“Not sidetracked,” Bucky said, “just a quick inventory enhancement.”

“I’m fine.”

Bucky shrugged. It was unfair how offhandedly sexy the movement was.

“Suit yourself.”

He stopped in front of a large portrait of a young woman wearing a long, frilly dress that cascaded around her like sea foam and a little dog on her lap. With one finger he felt along the right-hand edge of the frame, then suddenly jerked the whole painting to the left. It slid easily, revealing a dark passage on the other side. Bucky climbed through easily, like a cat taking a stroll about the house. Steve tried to match that grace, but his toes felt like little ice cubes. It made it hard to maintain his balance gracefully.

Bucky slid the portrait back into place behind them, leaving them in the pitch blackness of the hidden passageway. For a few seconds, the darkness pressed down on Steve like a physical weight. He couldn’t see anything, and while he trusted Bucky he couldn’t shake the primal fear reaction to being unable to see what was going on around him. Then, before his eyes, the walls began to glow.

It was only a soft light, which cast as many shadows as it held at bay, but Steve was intensely grateful for it. Little pink and blue splotches appeared on the walls, followed by light yellows and greens. The purple dots came to life last, in little swirling clumps like a clump of wildflowers. Their light fell on Bucky’s face, spotlighting his jaunty smile but leaving his eyes in shadow.

“See, it’s not that bad.”

“What are those?” Steve asked. “It’s like someone used glowing paint on the walls.”

“Look a little closer,” Bucky said. “They’re mushrooms. Don’t ask me why they glow, someone must have done something to them that they shouldn’t have. Some sort of science experiment, I guess. Who knows. But they make for good lamps.”

He took Steve’s hand in his flesh one, which was startlingly warm in the icy cold, and pulled him deeper into the passage.

“We’re almost there. Once we get to the end of this tunnel, we’ll be there.”

His words were upbeat and encouraging, but his movements were stiff, and his eyes darted wildly between Steve and their path. Steve fought the urge to ask him if he was alright. Whatever it was Bucky was spooked by, he clearly wasn’t acknowledging it.

After another minute of walking through the glowing tunnel, Bucky finally slowed to a stop in front of a dark patch of wall. He tapped it with his metal finger, and it shifted outwards a few millimeters. Then he slid it to the side the way he had with the other painting.

He offered Steve his hand, which Steve accepted immediately, and then the two of them stepped out into the room on the other side.

The first thing to hit him, even before he laid eyes on the room, was the cold. The hidden room was absolutely freezing. He drew breath to ask Bucky why the temperature was so dramatically different, and the lungful of frozen air felt as sharp and painful as a blade through his chest. Tremors began to rock his body.

Bucky did not seem affected.

“Bucky,” He tried, forcing each word out through stuttering lips and teeth that he couldn’t keep from chattering, “Why is it so cold?”

Bucky held up a finger to his lips, then gestured for Steve to look at the room.

They emerged into a room glittering with ice. It covered the walls and ceiling, and large formations of it broke up the floor and ceiling. In most places it was white, but in places it was a dull red or brown. It all shone in the mesmerizing light of a large, glowing, electric blue column attached to the back of a large chair. It could have been a throne set piece, another strange thing forgotten down in the basement, were it not for the thick straps on the arms and legs and the chest restraints that hung limp and slack in the seat itself.

“It powers my collar,” Bucky said. The words were plain and toneless, but Steve could hear a growl underneath that. “Sometimes, when they want me to do something, they bring me down here and strap me to that chair and connect it directly to the collar’s wiring.” He nodded his head at the battery. “I don’t know what they made that thing out of, but it’s strong. If they hook the collar up to it, the shocks are powerful enough that everything in my head just goes white. I can’t think, I can’t speak, I can’t get away. By the time I come back to myself, I’ve done whatever it is they wanted me to do.”

He turned away from Steve so that his shoulder length hair blocked his face. The plates on his metal arm whirred and shifted, but the rest of his body had gone stone still. Steve wanted to reach out and pull him into a hug, put a hand on his face, do something to comfort him, but he was positive that if he so much as touched him, Bucky would fall apart.

“Sometimes when I come to, I don’t recognize any of the ballerinas. Sometimes, there are bodies, or traces of them. Sometimes there’s just nothing, and I can never find out what it is that they wanted me to do. Sometimes bits and pieces come back, but not often.”

Steve felt like he was going to throw up. Was Bucky really saying-

“They usually don’t need to do that, though.” Bucky’s chilling voice spoke in tandem with the words of realization ringing in his own head. “Usually they can just shock me with the collar, turn my thoughts all staticky and hard to hold onto, then point me at whatever my mission is. When they’re done with me, they stick me back in here until they have another mission for me.”

He tapped a metal finger against a small rectangle on the back of the collar that shone the same electric blue as the battery.

“They charged the collar up using that battery. As far as I can remember, they’ve only had to refill it once or twice; it’s a very powerful source. I can’t get it off. I’ve tried, I’ve tried so many times. Sometimes I feel like I might actually be getting somewhere, but then it turns on and shocks me over and over again, until I can’t see or control the muscles in my throat. It just goes on and on until they can send someone to drag me back down to this room.”

Horror descended on Steve like a fever, weakening his legs and making his hands tremble. Suddenly he wasn’t cold anymore. Or perhaps he was, but he just couldn’t focus on it. The blood stain he’d found, the rooms that moved, the stories about the people who went missing near the theater- it was all Bucky. Pieces of the puzzle began to fit together, and the picture they suggested was a nightmare incarnate.

“Which is why you have to go, Steve. Leave, as soon as you can. Get work at some other big theater with permanent dancers. You’re good enough to get the job. Just get out of here. It’s not safe for you to stay.”

“No, why would I leave? You can’t stay here, I’ve gotta help get you out of here!”

Bucky whipped around.

“No Steve! You need to go.”

“Give me one good reason-“

“Look! There right there are your good reasons!”

One metal finger extended outwards to gesture at the iced-over edges of the room. Steve’s eyes followed his gesture and fell on a series of human-sized lumps in the wall of ice. He hadn’t noticed them during his initial survey of the room. To be fair, they didn’t stick out nearly so much as the giant glowing battery. There was something a little off about them, but what was it? He took a few careful steps closer, taking care not to slip on the ice.

His eyes widened, and he immediately slipped and fell, arms pinwheeling as he tried to step backwards. Bucky reached out and caught him before he could fall. The metal arm around his chest felt like an anchor, keeping him grounded as he processed his realization.

They were corpses.

“I’m good,” Bucky murmured into Steve’s ear, “But I’m not as good as I could be. There have been attempts to replace me over the years. I’ve made sure all of them failed. It’s bad enough that they have me. I can’t let them take anyone else.”

His breath was warm against Steve’s ear, like a caress.

“You’re so strong, Steve, and somehow you fit it all into such a small package. They thought you’d make a perfect replacement for me. That’s why they arranged to have glass put in your shoes. If you got hurt, that would give them an excellent opportunity to get you by yourself, in a medical ward, where they could give you the sorts of enhancements they’ve given me. You have to leave before they try again, Steve. I’ve always managed to get rid of my previous replacements, but I can’t bear to kill you. You’re the first person I’ve actually been able to talk to in decades. You’ve brought _warmth_ back into my life, Steve.”

Bucky’s powerful thighs flexed against Steve’s back as he guided him back towards the tunnel they’d come through. His words washed over Steve like waves of despair, but he didn’t interrupt. Not as Bucky walked them back through the darkness of the mushroom tunnel, not as they returned up the ladders and out-of-the-way staircases and through rooms that moved, bringing them from one corridor to another, not even when Bucky started to cry. He waited in silence until at last the shape of the doors and the layout of the corridors began to feel more familiar and Bucky’s stream of words had been reduced to a mere trickle.

When Bucky finally went silent, Steve reached up and put a hand on Bucky’s collar. Bucky flinched, but his hand remained steady over the chilled metal.

“Bucky. Listen to me. I am not leaving without you. If we can just get that collar off, then they can’t control you, right? Then you can run away with me.”

“The collar was never meant to come off, Steve. There’s no key to steal, because there’s no lock. You can’t slice it or force it open either. Believe me, I’ve tried. They always start shocking me if I so much as let my fingers linger on it for too long.”

“And they’ve never had to update it, never had to do any maintenance or anything like that?”

“They always shock me until everything goes white before they do that. When I come to again, they’re done.”

Steve hummed noncommittally and stood on tiptoes to get a better look at the collar.

Bucky was telling the truth about it not having a lock. It was almost perfectly smooth, and at least two inches thick all around. The only imperfections were a few bumps that showed up at regular intervals. He ran a finger over them; they didn’t feel exactly the same as the rest of the metal.

“Here, sit down so I can try something,” he said. “You’re so tall, it’s hard to reach.”

Bucky obligingly sat.

Forehead wrinkled and tongue between his teeth, Steve began to pry at one of the lumps with his fingernail. It was stubborn, but Steve was more than a match for an inanimate object. Eventually he managed to scape enough of the material away to make out what it was covering up.

It was a teeny tiny screw. He smiled.

“Come with me, Bucky. I think we can get you out of this.”

* * *

Bucky stood absolutely still while Sam fiddled with his collar. If the ever-present breezes hadn’t occasionally cause his hair to sway, he could easily have passed for a statue. The tiny screws made little friction-sounds as they scraped gently against the sides of their holes and the clarinet key screwdriver in Sam’s hands. With each sound, Bucky seemed to go tenser, until his whole body was as taut as a piano wire.

When the first screw finally came free and fell to the floor with a little metallic _ping,_ Steve just about had a heart attack. For a split second, he imagined the collar turning on, shocking Bucky with round after round of electricity, going on and on and on until he was on the floor sobbing through uncomprehending, empty eyes. He immediately felt stupid- even if they did mess up, just taking one screw out wouldn’t cause anything as dramatic as that. With effort he forced the wild galloping of his heart back to a more leisurely pace.

Bucky reacted even worse than Steve did. He bit his tongue so hard a thin ooze of blood began to trickle down his chin from between his lips, but he did not break his stillness.

Sam had the foresight to position one of his hands under the second screw, so that it fell noiselessly into his palm instead of onto the floor.

The sewing needle-sized screwdriver looked even more ridiculous against Bucky’s collar than it had against the fussy little clarinet keys, almost none of which were wider than the pad of a finger. When Sam’d been tightening the screws on the instrument, it was a specialized tool, something he could picture an expert using while bent over a malfunctioning but beloved instrument in a workshop somewhere. But against Bucky’s muscled bulk and the thick expanse of the collar, it looked like a hilarious mistake.

The next pin came free, then the next.

Slowly, Sam worked at the collar until at last there was nothing holding it together around Bucky’s neck. With trembling hands, Steve reached out and pulled on the metal. A piece of it came away in his grasp, and the rest of it fell to the floor with a clamorous _thud_ that echoed off the walls and through Steve’s chest.

Bucky looked first at Steve, then down at the pieces of the collar strewn across the floor like spilled garbage, then back up at Steve again. His eyes were wide and unblinking, and the wetness that began to gather there wobbled with his minute, full-body trembling. The thick tears clung to his lashes for interminable, stretched-out seconds, and then like a dam breaking they began to fall in shining rivulets down his face.

“Thank you,” he said, and sank to his knees. The broken pieces of the collar fanned out around him.

Steve lurched forward as though pulled by Bucky’s distressed joy. He didn’t know what to say or do, so he let one small hand rest against Bucky’s hair. Bucky responded by leaning into him so that his forehead rested against Steve’s ribs. Even kneeling and partially bent over, the soldier came partway up Steve’s chest.

Sam started gathering up the pieces of the collar. Steve knew that he should help him, or at the very least thank him, but he couldn’t seem to think clearly. Everything felt fuzzy and happy and awful. Bucky was free, but the fact that he needed to be freed at all still hung over them like a shadow.

“Should I call the cops or something?” Sam asked. “It looks like you’ve got the comforting part under control.”

“Talk to Natasha first,” Steve replied. “I think she has a better handle on what’s going on than any of us do.”

Sam flashed him a thumbs out as he slid out the door, and then it was just Steve and Bucky.

Bucky stared at the pieces of his collar like he was looking at the bones of some fearsome monster. When Steve wrapped his arms around him, he could feel him trembling like a papery leaf in an autumn breeze.

“I’m free,” he whispered.

“You are,” Steve whispered back.

“Can I kiss you?” he whispered, quieter, like someone might try and snatch his words away.

“Of course.”

It was the warmest Steve had felt since coming to the theater.

**Author's Note:**

> Link to the twitter version of the art: https://twitter.com/calendulaes/status/1142603788856901632

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [assorted moodboards](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20504309) by [kocuria-visuals (kocuria)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kocuria/pseuds/kocuria-visuals)




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